I have a love/hate relationship with juicing. On the one hand, its great for providing you with ready to be absorbed nutrition. Since the fiber is taken out, you have so many vitamins and minerals from the fruits and veggies that don’t have to fight your digestion in order to be used.

But on the other hand, without all the fiber to slow down your digestion, the sugar in juices also gets rapidly absorbed and what once was healthy and nutritious becomes a sugar laden drink, that's making us fat. Not cool.

Think about it like this: It would be quite difficult and time consuming for you to eat 4 apples in one sitting. If I juice them, however, it can take you not even 30 seconds to drink it down without an issue. The problem with that is you’re getting so much sugar. Fruit was designed by nature with fiber to slow down the sugar consumption. It is a disservice to strip it away.

The FastBeets Solution:

I still drink juices from time to time, but I never add fruits to it. I’ll get a combination of green veggies like spinach, kale, celery, cucumber, lemon and ginger. These provide you will so many easy to absorb vitamins without the added sugar hazards of high in fructose fruits without their fiber intact.

The other approach that is gaining more traction in health food stores are blended fruit/veggie smoothies. When you blend all of the veggies you get to have all the fiber. And guess what? Fiber is so good for you! In fact, most Americans fall short of their daily recommended amount of daily fiber intake. Just like with the juices, I still warn against too much fruit consumption in smoothies. Just because its in a health food store or a healthy juice shop doesn't mean that all of the fruit is good for you. Fruit is something we need to consume in moderation. I love how these juice and smoothie bars are popping up everywhere these days, but I caution you to think about how the ingredients in each drink will serve you and its okay to tell your juicing barista to use less fruit.